


The Winter Of Our Vriskontent

by RubilineRoundabout



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Asshole Vriska Serket, Blood, Canon Divergence During The Epilogues But In A Really Weird Way, Cerebral Horseshit, Character Study, F/F, Homestuck-Typical Violence, Implied Trans Vriska, Introspection, Mild Gore, Navel-Gazing, No Smut, Self Hatred Turned Up To 8, Too Many Vriskas, Troll Molting (Mentioned), Vriska Hates Vriska, and that's a promise, but all vriskas are assholes so does that really count as a tag, unreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 06:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21094901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubilineRoundabout/pseuds/RubilineRoundabout
Summary: Vriska is alone.|AND| Vriska needs to find her way back to Paradox Space.|OR| Vriska tries to find solace in the only other people who understand her.|OR| Vriska has escaped the end of all things, and found herself in the beginning.|OR| Vriska is thirsty for an actual adventure.





	The Winter Of Our Vriskontent

#  **Chapter 1**

##  **Location: ????????**

#  ꙮ

VRISKA floated through the unceasing, uncaring void. She was only mildly aware that she was slowly rotating, the frictionless medium of extracanonical nonspace not exerting a single iota of force on her body. Her surroundings were gray - the gray of nothing, the gray of transparency on browsers. It was a perfectly generic gray, she mused. As if in response, a single verdant rounded cube tumbled past her, lightly tapping against her red canvas sneaker as it passed.

It had been the first touch she had felt in a good long while. She wondered whether it was her who was moving very slowly, or whether that PGO (she had taken to abbreviating them as such due to their uncommon yet not-quite-rare appearance in this space between spaces) was travelling only a hair faster than her. After all, there was no way of telling her current heading or speed, or whether those two concepts even existed in a place outside of space and time.

Even in the Furthest Ring (a place she only had a limited understanding of, despite all of her exploits within,) there were at least awful tentacle monsters everywhere, and you could tell if you were getting anywhere at all. This was simply… nothing. No sound, no real color (aside from herself, the hunk of spacetime lodged in her arm, the cerulean drip-drip-dripping out in a viscous ribbon into infinity [examining it closely, she could see a wide lengthwise spiral, so she was indeed spinning,] and the odd PGO.) She suddenly realized that she was nesting navelgazing parentheses within each other, falling prey to introspective recursion. Fuck, she was stronger than this, wasn’t she? She’d survived worse, right?

**…**

No, this was the worst. It was only a matter of time until either starvation stole her life from through her stomach, or psychological starvation stole her sanity through her thinkpan. And worse…

“I NEED TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS!!!!!!!!” she hollered impotently into the void. It didn’t really even feel like a “holler” - there were no aural reflections off of any objects, and not even the hollow ring of empty space (space dust reflecting her vocalizations [how does that work? <god tier lets her breathe in space, obviously.> <but what about sound?> <what about it?> <sound requires air, moron.> <oh.> <yeah, oh.>] back at her in a hollow cheap facsimile of an echo) swaddled her voice this far outside of the concept of space. It was just… nothing.

Now that she thought about it, how was it that she wasn’t bleeding out? She glanced again at her pernicious wound, the ribbons of cobalt (cerulean? [she’s a value cusp <at least be consistent {fine}>]) unperturbed by any wind or secondary motion. It was like a line approximating an extruded version of her wound. She wriggled her arm, biting back a quiet scream at the mind-numbing pain. It was actually really fucking funny, she realized, that it was THAT particular arm that got the short end of the injury rod. She could almost feel the metal again, a phantom pain for a limb that was once-lost-then-replaced-then-lost-then-regrown-now-injured. Wow! She could really go for a matching eye injury as well. She’d love to have a shard of abstract spacetime shoved as deep as it could go into her left ocular socket! Bring it on, bitch multiverse! Fuck it! Let’s go! Yeah!!!!!!!!

She flexed again, savoring the pain. A little more blood gushed out, a welcome relief from the constant drip-stream she had been bleeding prior. Awesome! It was kind of a shame that she had so much blood (yet another highblood trait coming to kick her in the pumpcage) to lose. It wasn’t like she was going to pass out from blood loss while she had all this adrenaline still going in her. She’d keep enough blood in her thinksponge to be fully conscious for when her heart gave out. She’d probably only lose consciousness after she’d lost full use of her arms and legs, which would place her in a situation she would be unable to - 

Control.

Her skin suddenly felt clammy. No, no no no nononono. She couldn’t die here. She couldn’t fucking give up now! She was VRISKA SERKET, the one and only! Fuck the void! Fuck this internal dialogue she had going (yeah fuck you too, me) and FUUUUUUUUCK dying alone out here! She braced herself and engaged that phantom limb of god-tier flight she hadn’t used in a while. That didn’t stop being a thing or anything. As if by instinct, her orange-creamsicle (she misses Terezi) garb materialized around you. Her prior (sick ass) digs, assumedly, would come back later, once she decided she was sick of looking like a barkgrub wingfairy from Candyland Sucrosewoods. But for now, with a forceful flap of her wings, she forced herself to a stop.

Well, she tried to force herself to a stop. The actual reality, she quickly realized, was that she’d have to skid through the air for a good long while, if the backwards force she was experiencing was anything to go by (well, there’s her answer to the question of her speed relative to the PGOs she’d seen.) Now she realized that the blue “ribbon” she was looking at was actually composed of drip after drip of her blood (that’s why she wasn’t bleeding out - it actually wasn’t a very bloodied wound on closer inspection,) which had slowly been leaving her body in a thin strand. As she grit her teeth and forced herself to a complete stop, she realized that she could probably just follow it back to familiar paradox space and the site of the battle, so she could ascertain whether that big green piece of garbage was dead. 

She began to accelerate forward, and with nothing to hinder her, she realized that she was picking up speed quite quickly. And just as well - she didn’t strictly want to remain here any longer than she needed to.

She couldn’t really count the time it took her to get to the start of her bloody trail. It was fundamentally irrelevant how much time had passed, considering time was a mortal construction for the insides of universes, none of which applied to Vriska Serket, freshly marooned from a ship that was nowhere to be seen.

No universes in sight. Not even the faintest whisper of a horrorterror. She'd clipped right out of paradox space itself and ended up Nowhere Itself. 

She sucked in a deep breath. The non-air tasted like cotton.

“FUCK!!!!!!!!”

She was hungry, so she popped open her sylladex to rifle through it. She’d gotten her hands on a control deck and modified her 8-ball modus with a wallet to create… a sort of abstracted 8-ball-filled inventory? It was mostly piles of balls, hardly organized into barely-coherent groups of things similar in theme. Her “consumables” pile was pretty meager, but she grabbed an 8-ball and shattered it over her knee. It was, of course, a lunchgrub sandwich, about as fresh as when she tossed it in her sylladex over a year ago (not very.) It would do, for now, and as she gnawed on a slightly stale corner, she contemplated how she had gotten so far from reality as she knew it.

She was fighting that giant green monster - Lord English, or whatever the fuck his name was. She had been hit by a splinter of spacetime shattering from the force of the black hole that was suddenly where the Green Sun was. She was pulled off of the ground and pulled into the accretion disc of the black hole. And just as she was being pulled apart, seeing time speed up, seeing Lord English rocket past her - 

She felt herself being launched out. She’d heard of similar maneuvers - she wasn’t just into gamblignants, but also their modern day cramarauder contemporaries, who would use gravity wells to fling their ships at high speeds without a trace of psionic aura It was a power saving and time-saving technique that lent itself quite well to being thrown out of reality by a reality-rending hole in reality (she’s laying it on too thick.)

She was distracted from her idle revelry by the sound of a scuttlebuggy horn. 

What the fuck????????

She raised her head from her sandwich. There was most definitely a car (a _ human _car) floating there. And inside…

* * *

VRISKA floated through the unceasing, uncaring void. She was only mildly aware that she was slowly rotating, the frictionless medium of extracanonical nonspace not exerting a single iota of force on her body. Her surroundings were gray - the gray of nothing, the gray of transparency on browsers. It was a perfectly generic gray, she mused. As if in response, a single verdant rounded cube tumbled past her, lightly tapping against her red canvas sneaker as it passed.

Her twin braids sort of whipped around her, informing her of her speed (which was far too fast.) Tears brimmed in her eyes. She had been floating through infinity for what felt like either an hour or a millenium, and she still wasn’t over what had happened.

Her tattoos prickled at her skin. She suddenly hated them. Why had she thought that they were a good idea???????? The other Vriska - the one with more of a claim to “reality” and “canonicity” than her was right. She kind of WAS pathetic, and tattoos WERE for losers. And she was… kind of a loser. She sniffled heavily. How had she let herself come to this? How did she let herself get so... 

So...

Woobified?

Woobified was definitely the right word. She prodded at her stomach - her once-fit abs had softened from disuse. The prodding fucking hurt, too - not something she had felt a lifetime ago now ached dully. She suddenly wanted to tear off her sleeveless top, her shitty jorts, her awful leggings. She wanted to tear her fucking piercings out of her face. But, for now, she settled on unclasping those horrible tacky bracelets from her wrists and flinging them into the infinite void.

Huh. She rubbed her wrists. Felt weird.

She curled into a ball, her arms around her knees. It wasn’t as if it was cold - it was purely neutral in temperature, really. Generic room temperature. Completely normal. But shit, she missed Meenah. She missed Terezi (who she had only seen for an hour before. She shook her head. If she started thinking about that, she’d start crying even harder. But she missed… She missed being important????????

In a fucked up way, really, she genuinely missed being Vriska. Like, the real one. It felt like she had some claim to her “development” back then. Some claim to the actual agency of being her, of actively deciding to soften up, to stop mattering, to stop stealing the spotlight for once and just take a seat. But the moment her blank white eyes met the glaring orange eyes of her replacement, it was over. She was a what-if again. What if Vriska had stopped caring? What if Vriska was weak? What if Vriska stopped being hypervigilant? What if Vriska wasn’t raised by a ravenous spider? What if Vriska’s psyche wasn’t stained with blood? What if Vriska was nice?

What if Vriska was _ useless? _

She choked back a sob. That’s what she was! Useless. She was Vriska, but useless. She was the Vriska who had abandoned what made her herself, and now she was dead and stuck in an infinite null hell dimension. That’s what she fucking deserved anyway, for being a giant goddamn pansy and abandoning her _ one postmortem responsibility. _ The single enemy that was left for her to kill. And she just walked away. What was one green buff shithead compared to the piles of bodies she’d left in her wake? 

Obviously enough to turn her from someone strong into a coward. She was too cowardly to even keep a matesprit. And, as usual, she was alone. But this time, she wasn’t even alone by her own choice. She was just alone because she was Vriska. It was the same as before, but not. She didn’t want to burn bridges anymore. She just wanted to feel alive again. But that wasn’t in the cards for her, was it? Unlucky - as was the rest of her life, no matter how badly she wanted it to be otherwise.

She uncurled and splayed out her limbs, feeling her rotation slightly slow. It was a weird feeling, really. She tensed what was left of her abs, and pushed back, trying to skid to a stop. It took a minute, but she managed to decelerate to what felt like stillness.

She brought her legs up and went cross-legged. She’d just sit here until she dissolved into ghost dust or whatever. No bubbles out here. Boring. Dull. Null. Nothing.

No irons and no fires.

She popped open her sylladex. 8-balls in wallet piles. She broke open an 8-ball and scooped up the pile of stale popcorn. She shoveled a couple of kernels into her protein chute. This is what she’d been reduced to - stress-eating as a coping mechanism. Come _ on. _ She felt disgusted with herself even as she chewed the rubbery kernels. Ugh.

Was this just going to be what her life was now? Permanent nothing-purgatory? It’s what she deserved, she thought, suppressing another sniffle. The trash can for the trash Vriska. The _ real _ Vriska was out doing heroic things, doing HER job, while she just sat in the void waiting for entropy to grab hold of her and slowly shake her apart. She closed her eyes and let go of the popcorn, letting it slowly drift away in the absence of gravity. She let herself drift off to sleep. Eat and sleep. That was all she was good for now.

And then she heard the honk of a scuttlebuggy. 

What the fuck?

* * *

VRISKA floated through the unceasing, uncaring void. She was only mildly aware that she was slowly rotating, the frictionless medium of extracanonical nonspace not exerting a single iota of force on her body. Her surroundings were gray - the gray of nothing, the gray of transparency on browsers. It was a perfectly generic gray, she mused. As if in response, a single verdant rounded cube tumbled past her, lightly tapping against her long black boot as it passed.

It wasn’t as if anybody had called her Vriska for the past hundred or so sweeps. Not since she was a little stupid baby wiggler on Alternia, before the drones came for her, before she was shipped far off into the black as an enforcer on some poorly-policed backwater xeno colony. Not since before her adult molt, not since her skin was still gray and her eyes were still orange. No, she was hardly Vriska. She was THE O8LIG8OR, bound by fate but with pride unbroken. 

She shifted uncomfortably in her enforceradicator’s coat. It was always a bit too heavy - a bit too formal. Her dice, too, shifted uncomfortably in their lusus-leather pouch. Her cerulean-filled eyes scanned the endless nonhorizon and burned holes into the null fabric of unreality.

See, she had regrets. She had a few. But none of them involved her situation. She came here willingly, from a dying universe with its’ premise invalid. She watched as it faded from her backwater - as, one by one, people were erased. She **knew** people who had been erased. Knew, in the past tense, both because they were dead and because she… couldn’t remember them. She couldn’t fucking remember her friends, her moirail, her **matesprit.** She didn’t remember at all. All she had were mementos - a scrap of teal-red cloth here, an iron necklace she’d forgotten the meaning of there. And as she faced down the all-consuming irrelevance of her timeline, she threw the dice one last time…

And she appeared here, hale and healthy and dice floating beside her.

And so she figured, this was it. This was what death felt like. Infinitely floating absolutely nowhere.

So why did her body feel so **real?**

Surely this wasn’t death. This wasn’t the sweet embrace of unconsciousness. Perhaps she would crave that sweet kiss of demise some other time, when her affairs were settled and she had time to breathe and feel her loss. But for now, she spun, her coat furrowing in the wind.

She idly rubbed at her robot arm. She would have had a thought about that, if she hadn’t suddenly felt a cold thud at the small of her back. She jolted, less from the pain of slamming into a hunk of metal, and more from the surprise of slamming into **anything** this far into nowhere. She spread her arms and felt around behind her. It felt like…

A scuttlebuggy? But rather than the organic carapace, it was all metal. She pushed herself around, hooking a claw around what appeared to be an inorganic mirror, and gazed upon the alien vehicle. It was definitely a scuttlebuggy, with wheels instead of legs, and made entirely from nonorganics, save for the leather interior cushions. She tugged at the door, which popped open with a satisfying thunk. And then, she realized something terrible.

She wouldn’t be able to fit. But obviously, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like that stop her. She grit her pointed teeth and grabbed the top edge of the door. She wedged her feet into the base of the car, and pulled up **hard.** The roof screeched with the sound of twisting metal and snapping plastic as she tore the whole roof off of the vehicle. Her cobalt blood dripped from the two new cuts in her hands as she flung the roof into the infinite ether. She clambered in, her seven-foot-and-change frame still way too large for the seats. What was this vehicle for, wigglers? Fuck, dude.

She pushed what she assumed was the accelerator with some level of trepidation. She was incredibly surprised to see that the controls on the vehicle was analogous to an actual scuttlebuggy, and even more surprised to actually feel acceleration. She considered that perhaps it wasn’t the fact that the wheels were spinning on any sort of ground, but more the fact that the vehicle was intended to go forward, and that was why it went forward. Hmm.

She pushed the accelerator down as far as it could go and relished the feeling of… well, acceleration. There wasn’t any wind in her hair, but she felt her body go flat against the seat as she gunned it through empty nonspace.

What was that in the far middle distance? Was that… her?

The O8lig8or slammed on the brakes and came to a silent halt. She squinted, with augmented vision eightfold, and confirmed. Yeah, that was… her. She thought. She’d never be caught dead wearing **that ** outfit. And obviously, she didn’t have that tattoo. But the curve of her jaw… the way her slightly-too-broad shoulders wore her sleeveless shirt… her **horns…** that was most definitely Vriska Serket minus a hundred sweeps.

And minus any fucking dignity, the O8lig8or noted as she slowly drove forward. What version of her would wear her hair like that? Would look as pathetic as that? Was she eating **popcorn? **Yeah, throw it away. She would never let herself go like that. She grit her teeth, bile rising in her throat. Maybe this was what passed for hell in these parts. 

And she slammed her palm on the middle of the wheel, hoping for a horn.

* * *

Vriska sat uncomfortably next to her… adult self? Honestly, that scared the shit out of her. Hell, the version of her that was only one and a half sweeps older scared the shit out of her. It wasn’t going to get any better with a fully adult-molted version of her. But what timeline was this woman from? She was almost… admirable. Regal, in a fucked up way. She figured she’d have tried to become a gamblignant, running from the Imperial law. But, obviously, fortune hadn’t favored her, and she guessed an enforceradicator was fine. Not her first choice.

But being this particular Vriska wasn’t her first choice, so obviously they were in the same boat here. Her eyes slid downward. Wasn’t this John’s dad’s car? What happened to the roof?

“I ripped the roof off.” the O8lig8or murmured. Vriska suddenly became aware of the passive buzzing in her head of surface level mind-reading.

Vriska turned to her. “Why?” She immediately regretted it when the adult’s cerulean eyes slid to her like searchlights. But then, the adult's neutral expression dropped, and she snorted, barely cracking a smile.

“I’m seven and a half feet tall, kid-clone.”

“Right.” She felt stupid for even asking. Of course. Duh. Stuuuuuuuupid.

“I can hear that. Stop that. It’s disgusting.” the O8lig8or snapped.

“Stop what?” Vriska’s eyebrows shot up.

“8eating yourself up in your internal monologue.” the adult spat.

“How did you-” she started, before she felt the singular feeling of her own powers being used against her, her lips sealing themselves shut. The adult shot a wry look to the kid.

“Okay, wow, stop talking. You’re even dum8er than I remem8er 8eing as a k- at your age. What, did you 8ackslide into 8eing a little fucking wuss?”

Vriska felt her head nod involuntary. Beside her, the O8lig8or barked out a laugh. “Ha! Just a joke. I’ll let go now.”

Vriska gasped as the hold was released from her. It was heavy - oppressive, even. The transition between mind control and independent control was tricky on the autonomous nervous system, she knew, but this was the first time she was subjected to it herself. And with the power of an adult troll, it was only a testament to the O8lig8or’s sheer mastery of her mind control that Vriska hadn’t simply died the moment she’d let go.

“Please don’t do that.” Vriska pressed herself deep into the seat, suddenly sullen.

“Oh, you say please?” The O8lig8or snorted. “Wow, did I somehow forget 8eing this much of a pushover, or did 8eing dead rot your pan that 8ad?”

Vriska sighed. “Well, it’s not like I’m the _ real _ version of you.”

The O8lig8or looked confused at that. “What do you mean? We’ve already esta8lished that you’re me as a kid, 8ut dead due to some kind of game..? I’m foggy on the details.”

Vriska sucked in a breath. “Well, some complicated things happened and now there’s another Vriska with a bigger claim to Vriskahood than me. For the 8etter, I think.” She shrugged. “Pro8a8ly a bigger claim than you, too.”

“Now what does that mean? As far as any num8er of Vriskas go, I count myself at the forefront.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. She grimaced, thinking about Vriska Prime. “Yeah, tell that to _ her. _”

“If she’s anything as pathetic as you, I don’t think that’ll change a 8it.”

At that, Vriska barked a short laugh. “Like _ me? _ Oh, ha, no. She’s…”

She paused. Her adult self motioned to go on.

“8etter than me in every single way. She’s just 8etter.” she sniffled wistfully. “More 8adass, less of a coward, strong… uncompromising. Not like me. Just… just 8etter.”

“8etter, huh?” the O8lig8or mused. “What, like she never stopped 8eing a huge 8itch? Cause I was a giant 8itch at your age, and I’m still a giant 8itch now, and I 8n’t planning on changing that, 8ut… that’s kind of a restrictive definition of 8etter???????? I guess you mean she didn’t do…” she gestures to Vriska’s whole shit. “That.”

Vriska hung her head. “Yeah, no. That’s all me. 8ut I think the 8itchiness is sort of… integral to my identity? It made her more her.”

“Is it now.”

“I guess? It’s like… I’m the ‘Vriska that gave up.’ I stopped 8eing a huge 8itch. I 8uilt 8ridges instead of 8urning them. Fuck, I even held a matesprit for longer than a week!!!!!!!! And at the end of the d8y, wh8t did it do for me? N8THING!!!!!!!!” She was yelling now, suddenly, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. “SOMEHOW THAT MADE ME LESS VR8SKA!!!!!!!! AND WHEN SHE SHOWED UP, SUDDENLY I WAS VR8SKA PLUS PARENTHESES, AND NOT VR8SKA AT ALL!!!!!!!!”

“Well, I can definitely tell you that you’re not ‘Vriska.’” the O8lig8or muttered. Vriska visibly deflated at that. The O8lig8or held up a claw. “Shut up, I’m not done. You’re not ‘Vriska,’ in the same way I’m not ‘Vriska.’ I decided to 8e the O8lig8or, right? I sort of… smoothly transitioned between being Vriska and the O8lig8or. 8ecause I had to grow up. And that’s an unavoida8le part of growing up, right. At some point, you have to decide what kind of person you want to 8e, whether that’s… giving up your gam8lignant dreams and getting real, or… 8ecoming a shitty needy sad sack shadow of your former self, I guess???????? Or maybe you just keep 8eing Vriska, or whatever.”

Vriska exhaled and put her arms on the dashboard, before burying her face in them. “Yeah, 8ut I want to… I don’t know. I don’t want to 8e… this.”

“Then don’t. Easy.” she rolled her eyes. “Not everything has to 8e an imperial fucking issue. You fell off the four-wheel cargo hauler of identity, 8ut you didn’t 8reak your legs. Get 8ack up if you’re mad about 8eing in the dirt.”

Vriska lifted her head out of her arms, and was about to agree with her before she noticed a glimmer of something out of the corner of her eye. “Hold on. Turn right. There’s, uh…”

The O8lig8or raised her eyebrows. “Is that 8lood? Is that **my** blood?” Two trails of blood, parallel to each other, streamed out as far as they could see, in both directions.

“Oh, follow it! May8e we can find another Vriska at the end?”

The O8lig8or didn’t respond. She just slammed her foot on the accelerator.

* * *

Was that Shitty Vriska and an ADULT????????

An ADULT HER????????

In JOHN’S DAD’S CAR????????

The adult troll coughed and murmured something to Shitty Vriska. Shitty Vriska nodded, and the two of them pulled up next to Vriska. 

“What the FUCK is going on????????” Vriska pointed at the adult. “WHO IS THAT???????? HOW DID YOOOOOOOOU,” she jammed her finger at Shitty Vriska, who looked like she’d rather be anywhere but here, “COME BACK TO HAUNT ME????????”

“It’s complicated.” Shitty Vriska mumbled. She obviously knew what Vriska thought of her, and looked a little resentful at the surface narrative labelling of herself as a ‘Shitty Vriska,’ but that certainly didn’t stop Vriska from thinking it any harder. “Just… just get in the car, ok? This is a Vriska collecting mission now, I guess.”

“What do YOU know about missions? In case you forgot, you GAVE UP on your last mission, you fat pierced-up failghost!!!!!!!!” Vriska spat. “Or did you forget that while you were fondling your shame glo8es and frolicking in an idyllic meadow while every8ody else actually contri8uted to WINNING?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re crying again. Grow a fucking exoskeleton, you tenderized cluckbeast meat cutlet!”

“Stop **pitchflirting **with yourself and. Get. In. The. Alien. Scuttlebuggy.” the Adult Vriska growled. She didn’t know what it was about her, but Vriska stood up a little straighter. Was that… fear? Did that bitch just make her feel fear? She bit back a growl and grabbed the side of the car, pulling herself over the roofless door and planting her ass across the backseat.

She needed some better names for the two other Vriskas. Shitty Vriska could be… Twintails. Adult Vriska could be-

“The O8lig8or.” the… the O8lig8or turned to her. Yeah, it was definitely her plus what, a hundred sweeps? It was really, really weird to see herself post-molt. She’d molt into her penultimate skin in, what, two more years - a sweep, rather? And then she’d molt again in ten more sweeps, and she’d look… Vriska looked the O8lig8or up and down from behind... pretty good. (but why is she wearing an enforceradicator coat? [she thought she’d become a gamblignant.] [it looked good on her, though.])

They drove in silence, for a while. It wasn’t really initially obvious to the three of them that they were even driving and not just sitting in silence in a car floating in unreality (well, they were [not the point]) but they were, in fact, somewhat “going somewhere,” even by virtue of simple existence. The hairs on Vriska’s neck stood on end as she realized how they were going, and what was actually going on.

“I think.” she started, and then cleared her throat. Her long spindly fingers interlocked nervously. Why was she nervous? This wasn’t that bad. Well, the chunk of spacetime lodged in her shoulder said otherwise, but it wasn’t THAT bad (it was.)

“I think,” she restarted her prior statement, “that the only way to get out of here is to do something relevant.”

“Do something **what.**”

Vriska pulled in a breath, went to answer, and instead, suddenly devoid of adrenaline, passed out from blood loss.

A long silence passed before Twintails even thought to turn back and check on Vriska Prime, who had, by this point, started to bleed out onto the seat. 

Twintails gave a look to the O8lig8or. “Do you think we should, uh, help her? Not that I… not that I want her around or anything! Just…….."

The O8lig8or sighed again and pressed her forehead to the top of the steering wheel, awkwardly hunched over. Her horns scraped against the windshield glass. “I’m no mediculler and I'm not our lusus. Do what you want.”

Twintails nodded as she clambered over the median cupholder and deposited herself clumsily into the backseat footwell. She shakily stood up over Vriska Prime and inspected the weird, glassy obsidian shard embedded into her upper arm. Deciding that it wasn’t worth the hassle to extract it properly, she grabbed both ends - _ ow, sharp, _ but what’s a bit of blood between time clones - and tugged. It flew free. She let go almost too quickly, letting it float off into the abyss. A pump of warm blood gushed from the now-open wound. It began slowly staining the pristine car leather. That was less promising. 

She knew what she was doing. She’d pirated Con Air.

Twintails grabbed the hem of her shirt and tore a long strip off. Tying it around the wound multiple times, she affixed it with a tight tie to make sure the bandage wouldn't adjust on the troll's arm. In essence, Twintails had made her a fashionable new bandage made of shirt fabric. The black cloth stood stark against V1's orange god tier pajamas. She had opted to put the wings away, so they weren’t taking up an inordinate amount of space in the backseat, which Twintails silently thanked her own psyche for. That counted, right? A self-thank is the same as thanking a self that doesn’t live in your body.

The O8lig8or turned her head to look at Twintails' handwork. "Looks bad." she said simply before turning back.

"Do you think she'll 8e okay?" Twintails whispered, climbing back over the median. She fidgeted with her hands nervously. 

"May8e."

#  ꙮ


End file.
